My kitchen and bathroom has 1970's "harvest gold" fixtures and appliances. I hated that at first, but I've gotten over it. My apartment is so overrun with my own stuff - paintings, antiques, hockey pucks, old Reds pennants, rugs, that I don't notice it anymore.

Our 1970-house kitchen had plywood doors on molded plastic cabinets, while the bathroom had lavender tub & toilet. When I ripped out the vanities, I found the original bathroom carpeting (!) was a stunning bright purple.

Yeah, my house had a lot of terrible updating done by the previous owners: paneled walls, dropped ceilings, wall-to-wall carpet in the bathroom (and the rest of the second floor, and it was commercial grade). But I have to be careful what I say about it, because it's the childhood home of my next-door neighbor.

I've never understood carpet in the bathroom. It just seems like a mildew magnet.

You know when they say to buy the shittiest house on a nice street? That was us. The previous owner (an old electrician/tinkerer/junk collector) had built a workshed in the yard that was only high enough for a roughly 5'4" man (him) to stand up in. He'd jury-rigged some electricity to it (which I promptly disconnected before knocking the whole bug-trap down. He left the basement and garage full of his old electronic/electrical flotsam (including old phone guts, which he apparently collected because they contain small amount of valuable metals). When we moved in (Nov. 1,'99), the house had no working furnace. There was a carbon monoxide detector mounted to it. Seems they'd run the furnace for heat until it set off the detector, and then they'd shut it down for a while. I've since replaced the kitchen, both bathrooms, the roof, front and side doors, and all the windows.

That's always been the approach in our family, but if I buy a condo, I don't want to have to do too much tearing and repairing because I have to live their while that's going on and in a small place that could be very hard or even unsafe.

To return to the original topic, sort of: If you like neighborhood names, we've got 'em out the wazoo.

What's the definition of small, Reed?

Yours,
Manhattan.

I am just crabby at living in the mostly densely populated place I could imagine, and not having the money to get space beyond 300sq ft. For two of us.

Mind, they used to squeeze six in back in the day without a bathroom.

Los Angeles neighborhoods: I counted 162, and that's not counted smaller areas in neighborhoods.

That's really small for two people. How much worse does it have to get until New Yorkers admit that their city isn't livable?

My stuff seems to expand to fill whatever space it's in, so I figure that wherever I live, I could always use a little more. My current place is about 600 sq/ft.

The city isn't viable for a student and a person in publishing, for sure.

It might be a bit more than 300sq ft, but it certainly is a very small and puts a strain on things. But it also hopefully stops me going into unfathomable levels of debt over the next two years.

The idea is that by next fall I will be in a position that we can move somewhere bigger (read - earning money). I know a lot of people living in bigger apartments who are at school, we just wanted to avoid debt being a big issue.

But at $1300+ per square foot on buying on this island, it isn't fun to consider getting a place any time too soon.

12ft by 26ft or thereabouts. so maybe 350 at best. Bijou.

Is this the right place to say that pretty much every interior photograph I've seen of a Canadian property has shown the most frighteningly awful taste in interior decor?

(looks about living room...tugs nervously at collar...)

No offence, like. I'm sure your place is very different.

Oh, 'very different' doesn't quite begin to describe it.